This issue describes how stormwater regs are being used to shift the homeless away from creeks and towards services, as well as options for relocating the Estuary’s orphan species. It also highlights projects designed to grow more fish food in the Delta, why plastic can smell like bird food out in the ocean, and how spot-on flea treatments aren’t staying on our pets but migrating onto home surfaces, down the drain, and out to the Bay.
F E A T U R E D A R T I C L E S
By Robin Meadows
California has nearly one-quarter of the nation’s homeless people—the most of any state by far—and thousands of them live in the Bay Area. Many are in outdoor encampments that lack basic services most people take for granted, including clean water, sewer hookups, and garbage collection. Out of all the social and environmental costs of homelessness, the trash that blows from encampments into waterways may help spur a solution. Under a new resolution, trash from homeless encampments now falls under the stormwater permit that requires Bay Area cities and counties to get storm drains virtually trash-free by 2022. READ ON
By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto
It’s hard to go to the big box pet store and not stumble over the flea control displays. Most pet owners have dabbed or squirted Frontline or Advantage between their cat’s shoulder bones or onto the back of their dog’s neck, but who would guess this same chemical would make its way off our pet’s fur, down the drain, through wastewater treatment, and into the Bay? Apparently all the petting and shedding and subsequent washing of hands, doggies, and floors is moving flea-killing chemicals into our household wastewater, and the treatment plants aren’t getting it out again. READ ON
By Kathleen M. Wong
The gold standard of conservation has always been to maintain species in their native habitat. But the outlook for the Sacramento Delta is now so dire that eminent scientists are calling for more radical methods to keep endemic species alive. In this December’s issue of
San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science, three eminent scientists report that “it is increasingly irresponsible to focus entirely on a policy of in situ conservation through habitat protection and restoration.” Researchers are already maintaining a captive “refuge population” of Delta smelt in captivity. Is the next step translocating winter-run Chinook to the Arctic Circle? READ ON
M A G A Z I N E I N B R I E F
By Nate Seltenrich
Delta smelt and Chinook salmon living in one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions are not getting enough to eat. Scientists now believe this shortage of food is a significant factor in both species’ dramatic decline. But a pair of experiments designed
to improve food supplies for the fish have shown promising results to date, and could soon be implemented on a larger scale. READ ON
By Lisa Owens Viani
When the state built the I-80 freeway in the 1950s, they put Pinole Creek in a 400-foot-long double box culvert below, creating an obstacle for migrating steelhead. After that, only a rare, super fish or two from the Bay could swim upstream to better spawning habitat. In 2016, the steelhead finally got a new low-low channel (“fishway”) to take them through one of the twin culverts. READ ON
By Lisa Owens Viani
A new report highlights how the ongoing lack of freshwater in the Estuary system is causing whales off the coast to starve—and the entire estuarine food web to decline. Meanwhile, new State Water Board recommendations aim to settle the question of what percentage of unimpaired flow fish in the San Joaquin River need to survive, let alone thrive. READ ON
By Joe Eaton
As plastic waste accumulates in the world’s oceans, more seabirds have been swallowing it. UC Davis researchers
say the avians are deceived by chemical signals in the form of a smell that reliably led their ancestors to tasty krill and other crustaceans. READ ON
By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto
“Buckets in the water and boots
on the ground,” is the current sta
tus of the Delta Regional Monitoring Program, according to manager Phil Trowbridge of the Aquatic Science Center. While this effort to coordinate and synthesize water quality monitoring results from the Delta started actual sampling more than a year and a half ago, the Program is now poised to deliver its first data reports. READ ON
By Tira Okamoto
As a recent graduate entering the climate workforce, I have realized that choosing a climate change focused career is like choosing to be Harry Potter. You are accepting a mission
to save both the climate in-the-know and deniers from an evil so dangerous all could be lost. Like Harry, we must acknowledge that working together produces stronger results. Attending a Bay Science Collaborative event this past September gave me hope. READ ON
By Cariad Hayes Thronson
Although the results of the 2016 general election have created a stormy outlook for countless federal environmental programs and policies, Bay Area environmental advocates are slightly cheered by a handful of successful state and local initiatives that promise to benefit the Bay and local waterways. READ ON
By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto
Nothing could be stranger than sitting in the dark with thousands of suits and heels, watching a parade of promises to decarbonize from companies and countries large and small, reeling from the beauties of big screen rainforests and indigenous necklaces, and getting all choked up.
It was day two of the September 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco when I felt it.
At first I wondered if I was simply starstruck. Most of us labor away trying to fix one small corner of the planet or another without seeing the likes of Harrison Ford, Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, Van Jones, Jerry Brown – or the ministers or mayors of dozens of cities and countries – in person, on stage and at times angry enough to spit. And between these luminaries a steady stream of CEOs, corporate sustainability officers, and pension fund managers promising percentages of renewables and profits in their portfolios dedicated to the climate cause by 2020-2050.
I tried to give every speaker my full attention: the young man of Vuntut Gwichin heritage from the edge of the Yukon’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge who pleaded with us not to enter his sacred lands with our drills and dependencies; all the women – swathed in bright patterns and head-scarfs – who kept punching their hearts. “My uncle in Uganda would take 129 years to emit the same amount of carbon as an American would in one year,” said Oxfam’s Winnie Byanyima.
“Our janitors are shutting off the lights you leave on,” said Aida Cardenas, speaking about the frontline workers she trains, mostly immigrants, who are excited to be part of climate change solutions in their new country.
The men on the stage, strutting about in feathers and pinstripes, spoke of hopes and dreams, money and power. “The notion that you can either do good or do well is a myth we have to collectively bust,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy whose state is investing heavily in offshore wind farms.
“Climate change isn’t just about risks, it’s about opportunities,” said Blackrock sustainable investment manager Brian Deese.
But it wasn’t all these fine speeches that started the butterflies. Halfway through the second day of testimonials, it was a slight white-haired woman wrapped in an azure pashmina that pricked my tears. One minute she was on the silver screen with Alec Baldwin and the next she taking a seat on stage. She talked about trees. How trees can solve 30% of our carbon reduction problem. How we have to stop whacking them back in the Amazon and start planting them everywhere else. I couldn’t help thinking of Dr. Seuss and his truffala trees. Jane Goodall, over 80, is as fierce as my Lorax. Or my daughter’s Avatar.
Analyzing my take home feeling from the event I realized it wasn’t the usual fear – killer storms, tidal waves, no food for my kids to eat on a half-baked planet – nor a newfound sense of hope – I’ve always thought nature will get along just fine without us. What I felt was relief. People were actually doing something. Doing a lot. And there was so much more we could do.
As we all pumped fists in the dark, as the presentations went on and on and on because so many people and businesses and countries wanted to STEP UP, I realized how swayed I had let myself be by the doomsday news mill.
“We must be like the river, “ said a boy from Bangladesh named Risalat Khan, who had noticed our Sierra watersheds from the plane. “We must cut through the mountain of obstacles. Let’s be the river!”
Or as Harrison Ford less poetically put it: “Let’s turn off our phones and roll up our sleeves and kick this monster’s ass.”
by Isaac Pearlman
Since California’s last state-led climate change assessment in 2012, the Golden State has experienced a litany of natural disasters. This includes four years of severe drought from 2012 to 2016, an almost non-existent Sierra Nevada snowpack in 2014-2015 costing $2.1 billion in economic losses, widespread Bay Area flooding from winter 2017 storms, and extremely large and damaging wildfires culminating with this year’s Mendocino Complex fire achieving the dubious distinction of the largest in state history. California’s most recent climate assessment, released August 27th, predicts that for the state and the Bay Area, we can expect even more in the future.
The California state government first began assessing climate impacts formally in 2006, due to an executive order by Governor Schwarzenegger. California’s latest iteration and its fourth overall, includes a dizzying array of 44 technical reports; three topical studies on climate justice, tribal and indigenous communities, and the coast and ocean; as well as nine region-specific analyses.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.
For the first time, California’s latest assessment dives into climate consequences on a regional level. Academics representing nine California regions spearheaded research and summarized the best available science on the variable heat, rain, flooding and extreme event consequences for their areas. For example, the highest local rate of sea level rise in the state is at the rapidly subsiding Humboldt Bay. In San Diego county, the most biodiverse in all of California, preserving its many fragile and endangered species is an urgent priority. Francesca Hopkins from UC Riverside found that the highest rate of childhood asthma in the state isn’t an urban smog-filled city but in the Imperial Valley, where toxic dust from Salton Sea disaster chokes communities – and will only become worse as higher temperatures and less water due to climate change dry and brittle the area.
According to the Bay Area Regional Report, since 1950 the Bay Area has already increased in temperature by 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit and local sea level is eight inches higher than it was one hundred years ago. Future climate will render the Bay Area less suitable for our evergreen redwood and fir forests, and more favorable for tolerant chaparral shrub land. The region’s seven million people and $750 billion economy (almost one-third of California’s total) is predicted to be increasingly beset by more “boom and bust” irregular wet and very dry years, punctuated by increasingly intense and damaging storms.
Unsurprisingly, according to the report the Bay Area’s intensifying housing and equity problems have a multiplier affect with climate change. As Bay Area housing spreads further north, south, and inland the result is higher transportation and energy needs for those with the fewest resources available to afford them; and acute disparity in climate vulnerability across Bay Area communities and populations.
“All Californians will likely endure more illness and be at greater risk of early death because of climate change,” bluntly states the statewide summary brochure for California’s climate assessment. “[However] vulnerable populations that already experience the greatest adverse health impacts will be disproportionately affected.”
“We’re much better at being reactive to a disaster than planning ahead,” said UC Berkeley professor and contributing author David Ackerly at a California Adaptation Forum panel in Sacramento on August 27th. “And it is vulnerable communities that suffer from those disasters. How much human suffering has to happen before it triggers the next round of activity?”
The assessment’s data is publicly available online at “Cal-adapt,” where Californians can explore projected impacts for their neighborhoods, towns, and regions.